What is SOHO Accounting in Finance?
Does having a SOHO specific accounting or finance program help your business?
In the business world, SOHO is more than a fancy New York district. SOHO refers to “small office/home office.” As almost any business owner could tell you, a small business or home based business is a distinct and different kind of business than a larger or more established organization. Therefore, processes like accounting and finance are smaller, more hands-on operations because there isn’t a whole department staffed with accountants.
Additionally, there are different tax laws for home offices than larger incorporated businesses, which means handling finances becomes another thing to master and task to tackle for business owners in addition to marketing, forming relationships with clients, and doing their day to day work. Luckily for the SOHO market, there are plenty of ways to help grow, shape, or simply organize your SOHO business’s finance.
Finance and Accounting Programs for Home Office and Small Business Owners
The do-it-yourself model of running finance in your business isn’t impossible with the right tools. In fact, some of the biggest benefits of using a SOHO specific software are ease of use and cost effectiveness. Some finance and bookkeeping programs offer many more features than small businesses need, confusing business owners and costing them to pay for more program than they’ll use.
Here are some easy to use (and often affordable) programs to help you handle your SOHO accounting and finance issues.
Zoho: This software claims it was “built for small businesses”. Their simple business statement says, “Zoho Books is an accounting software that manages your finances, gets you tax ready, automates business workflows, and helps you work collectively across departments.” It’s also easily scalable should your business grow from a home-based operation to something bigger and more complex. They offer complete customer support to help anyone – even those entrepreneurs with no finance background – handle their business.
GnuCash: This program is for managing personal or small business finances. It’s free to download and can be flexibly used on almost any operating system, including NU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. It helps home and small offices track bank accounts, stocks, income, and expenses.
TurboCash: This software program is also free to download. It has a lot of robust accounting features including, VAT accounting, invoicing, bank reconciliation, trial balance, balance sheet and income statements, and more. Plus, it can be configured for any country.
Soho Essentials: This software developer has designed a program called Small Office Advantage to help home offices and small businesses maintain and manage their finances. Their product can produce schedule C tax reports with minimal effort and data entry. They tout themselves as a solution for several kinds of businesses, including:
- Real estate agents
- Mortgage brokers
- Appraisers
- Personal trainers
- Insurance agents
- Independent consultants
- Freelance artists and writers
- Event planners
- eBay traders
- Resellers
- Independent distributors
- Etsy shop owners
- Small home-based ecommerce businesses
With finance touching various parts of a business from taxes to revenue to salary, it’s an important piece to get right and manage correctly. Has your small office or home office business benefitted from small business specific programs or software?
